


Leaving by Increments

by Chibiness87



Series: An Exercise in Nostalgia [6]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Cancer Arc, F/M, Season/Series 04, but angst with a happy ending, serious angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 07:04:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14612277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibiness87/pseuds/Chibiness87
Summary: It feels like it should be a movie directive. Slowly fade to black.





	Leaving by Increments

**Leaving by increments** by **chibiness87**  
**Rating** : T  
**Season/Spoilers** : Up to Redux II. Cancer arc fic.  
**Disclaimer** : Not mine.

 **Summary** : It feels like a movie directive. Slowly fade to black.

* * *

 He always knew she would leave him one day.

He never imagined it would be like this.

Slow.

Pan out.

Fade to black.

In his mind, she leaves him after the first case. Thanks but no thanks. Throws away a promising career in the FBI, nothing being worth chasing down suspected alien crafts in the middle of the night for. Instead, she becomes a doctor, makes her father proud. He’ll read about her in the paper, the recipient of an award, find a cure to… something. Some genetic disease or other. Create a new antibiotic. Something like that. Something that means she’ll have a wing in a hospital named in her honour. She lives a long and happy life, gets married and has a child, more than one, dies surrounded by fat grandchildren, and never thinks back to that odd week she had with a man whose sister was abducted by aliens.

He thinks back to that first night on their first case. She had stood on in his motel doorway, small and scared, and he thought she would have been on the first flight out of there in the morning. Back to whatever passed for a normal life.

But she had surprised him that night, and had stayed. Listened to him as he recounted the events that had led him here, down this path. The memory that haunts his nights, when he does finally sleep. The helplessness. The terror. But instead of doing what every other person in his sorry life has done, even Diana, that first time he told her, she stays. Listens. Doesn’t call him mad, or Spooky. Accepts him in a way no one else has ever cared to do. If he’s being completely honest, he’s humbled by it.

For the first night in almost 20 years, he feels a modicum of peace.

The first time he saves her life, he is almost too late. Colton is as much of a jackass as he’s ever had the misfortune to meet, and in his time at the Bureau he’s met a few, and the way he doesn’t listen almost costs his partner her life. He expects her to quit, maybe not there and then, but he’s certain she’ll come to her senses and quit while she still has a head on her shoulder and a liver in her gut.

But she doesn’t.

They get sent to the top of the world, and pull guns on each other, and surely this, this will be her snapping point. Partners are supposed to be able to trust each other; they’re not supposed to aim their weapons in steady grips at each others head. He’s reminded again just how tiny she is when he has to lower his arm slightly from vertical to keep her in his sights.

Later, hands on the skin of her neck, he can’t help but be just a little rough. Her slight gasp when he pulls her back to him goes to his head, and then it goes to his _other_ head, and this, this sudden _awareness_ of her is so much more dangerous than the flicker of doubt.

His worst nightmare comes true when he gets to the top of a mountain, and a mad man is there and his partner is not. He was too late, whatever that shit with the cable car was costing him precious time which he had needed.

They thought he was Spooky before, when it was his sister.

He wonders what they’ll call him now.

He wears her cross.

Call it sentimental, call it crazy. He’s not going to give up on her, even if the rest of the world seems to be doing just that. He has the strength of her beliefs, even if his own are nothing more than that of a gossamer thread.

Scully comes back into his life, and he can breathe again for the first time in 3 months. Until he gets to the hospital, and finds while her body may have been returned, there is absolutely no guarantees about the rest of her. The memory of him signing her living will haunts his every waking move, and more than anything he wants to go back to that moment and rip the damn document up. But he had respected her too much, trusted her too much, and he had signed right there on the dotted lie.

Next time he does something for her like that, because god, please, let there be a next time, he’s going to add a caveat that he’ll do so only on the promise he’ll never have to act on it again.

He’s certain he won’t be able to face all but pulling the plug on her like that again. 

In the end, it’s stupid how she finds it. On suspension, and having to go through the metal detectors of the front door. A piece of shrapnel, probably incidental, except he’s the one who gets shot in their partnership. And then it’s not shrapnel, it’s so much more than that. A chip, documenting who knows what about her and sending the information who knows where. He wants the guys to look at it, wants to get all the answers, but it’s a moot point, because it’s destroyed anyway.

Sometimes, he wonders just what they’re lives would have been like had she never found and removed that small disc of metal from her nape.

Curiosity killed the cat; and how unfair is it that of the two of them, she’s the one paying with her life?

In his dark moments, he wonders. Would she be here now, if they had just left the damn thing alone?

Her eyes are sunken, but her hair is still red. He knows this, even if the tones are muted to him. He has an idle thought that he’s glad she’s not a blonde; god knows how he would have been able to get any work done at all over the years, and instantly feels guilty.

Scully is lying on what for all intents and purposes has become her death bed, and he’s obsessing over her hair like a freak.

Death bed.

He wants to throw up.

Her eyes remain closed to his presence, and he falls into the chair at her bedside, grief and pain submerging him in waves. He never thought she’d leave him like this. Never thought he’d have to endure losing her by increments, one piece at a time.

He’s used to the pain of losing a loved one in a sharp moment. He’s never had to face them fading from view. He doesn’t know how to survive it.

He doesn’t know if he wants to.

But this is Scully. This is the woman who stared down the barrel of a gun he was holding, and told him it was OK. He won’t tarnish her memory like that. He can’t.

Tears fill his eyes, and he does nothing to stop them. He sobs with all the pain and fear he has, biting his fist in an effort to keep them quiet, so as not to wake her.

He’s in love with her, and how did it come to this for him to realise what that means?

He wakes in the morning before her, tracing over her features, burning them to his memory. He goes to the hearing, names Blevins as the mole, and is back at her bedside in a matter of hours.

Only, her bed is empty, and there is no sign of her family about, and he feels a wave of nausea form in his gut.

Please.

God.

No.

Before he can find someone, a doctor or a nurse or hell, he’ll even settle for Bill right now, he spots her being pushed down the hall.

She’s in a chair.

She’s sitting upright, in a chair, when she hasn’t been able to be do more than lie in bed for days, and when she sees him, her smile is so bright, so luminous, eyes clear and sparkling with barely suppressed joy, he knows what she’s going to say before she gets a chance to open her mouth.

The relief he feels is immediate, and he does what he’s been unable to do since that fateful day they stood in front of a panel of images, and she told him she had an inoperable brain tumour: he smiles.

* * *

End

Thoughts?

 


End file.
